The great global warming swindle

The West is running a protectionist racket against the developing world

Ross Clark

08 August 2007

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The West’s new greenness conceals a giant protectionist racket

only work if the recipients continue to live in very basic conditions. Once they aspire to Western, fossil fuel-powered lifestyles, then the scheme is undone. Needless to say, carbon-offsetting schemes only work in one direction: one can only imagine the reaction if a middle-class Kenyan tried to offset the carbon emissions from his swimming pool by buying Al Gore a dung-fired stove.

None of this is to say that the theory of global warming is wrong, or that mankind isn’t facing a man-made climatic disaster — I leave that debate to another time. It is just that increasingly the politics appear to be shifting the burden of cutting carbon emissions on to the world’s poor: they must be kept in a state of noble peasanthood so that we can carry on living pretty much as before. The attitude of the West can be summed up by Tony Blair’s remark when ‘offsetting’ the carbon emissions from his holiday last January to Florida: ‘It’s just not practical’ to ask people to give up their foreign holidays. Indeed not: far more practical that we assuage our environmental guilt by making the developing world give up their chance to aspire to our standard of living.